Personal Education

by Brian on 10-29-2009

in education,media

Last week I was flattered by an invitation to be interviewed about my DIY approach to education.

Nicole Veerman, Jim Saunders and Steve Howard from Wayne MacPhail‘s Online Journalism course at UWO went easy on me but I managed to flub most of it anyways.

Between that conversation and the interview I had with Thomas Cermak from LondonFuse.ca a few days earlier, I spent more time talking about my “career” than I’ve had over the previous 7 years combined.

So I was a little rusty.

I think I probably learned more than the students did.

Despite all the criticisms I toss at the news business, I’d love to be getting a journalism degree right now. Things have certainly changed since I first looked at it in 2001 (then in 2003, then ’05, ’07…’8…).

I’m betting the Class of 2010 will go out and kick some serious ass (if they want to).

Compare the position these students are in to those who started a one-year MA in 2008. I imagine there would have been a lot more skepticism in the air — a lot more dismissive remarks and gestures from old-schooler instructors that “there will always be newspapers,” etc.

(I’m really just guessing. I’m open to being corrected on this point — though I certainly saw more skepticism in writing a year ago.)

A year ago today Obama hadn’t been elected yet; the presence of new, smaller, more focused online operations like 538.com and Politico hadn’t fully registered. Twitter use was a fraction of what it is now. That famous plane in the Hudson hadn’t happened yet, nor had the election in Iran. Tribune Co hadn’t declared bankruptcy. Detroit’s dailies still printed daily. The Seattle Post Intelligencer still printed…

And then consider the class that will start a year later, graduating in 2011.

By next year a lot of the digital tools and practices will have become more sophisticated and professionalized. There will be a lot more people standing over shoulders saying, “you’re doing it wrong.”

As of now everybody can still play. The ideas can easily come from anywhere. An undergrad can write the most discussed meta-commentary of the day (if not the whole week).

After listening to the latest Rebooting the News podcast [listen] that Jay Rosen and Dave Winer do (this week with Jeff Jarvis too) I actually experienced pangs of enthusiasm to maybe go back to school.

Rosen just developed a new studio program that explores new practices and methodologies, while Jarvis teaches and runs a project exploring new business models for news. They were talking about those and I got kind of excited.

If there were programs like that 10 or even 5 years ago I wouldn’t have been “self-educated,” I would have stayed within institutional walls.

So I browsed over to UWO‘s site (which I do from time to time), thinking about graduate work in media studies or something. I figure, I’ve already done so much of the homework, I might as well join the tribe and get the documentation to back it up.

But here’s the thing.

I have a 3 year BA with gentleman’s C’s — which is my bad, I know; but I can’t change it now either way. So I have to take courses before I can even apply for an MA.

So fine, I can do that…

But let’s see… I’ll be taking undergrad courses and hopefully by the fall of 2011, if all goes well, I can start an MA, building up to an independent research project… And what could possibly change in the world in the next 18 months?

Finally I decide that I might as well just keep doing what I’m already doing, somewhat successfully.

I’ve been going through these cycles for close to a decade.

Yesterday it was journalism and media. A month from now there might be a huge foreign affairs crisis, or whatever, and that will make me super-inquisitive about things related to that — politics & economics, etc — and then I’ll cycle back to (my favourite) philosophy.

And the actual value isn’t so much in the content as it is in the ability to learn and adapt to new challenges and opportunities.

And the more I master that, the less it makes sense to go back to school… Unfortunately none of this is a direct avenue to a career. That’s the one thing I really have trouble figuring out.

I’ll figure it out one day.

But anyways… Long story, um, short, I’m looking forward to the EduPunk panel discussion on Nov. 16!

[And sorry for spelling any/everybody's name wrong.]

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Tagged as: careers, edupunk, jay rosen, jeff jarvis, learning, news, personal education, school, self-education, university, uwo

  • Jodi Simpson

    Don't sweat it. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do and I fully expect to make at least 10 more career changes in the process.

    Its just too bad we couldn't just make a career of being Renaissance men/women. I think we'd feel a lot less restless and whole lots happier. Don't you?

    Jodi

  • http://www.sagecomm.com/ Jeff Sage

    Smart people will care less (more so as time passes) about your grades in undergrad and will be more interested about what you've actually accomplished and how you might add value.

    Are you a community organizer? Have you showed you can speak intelligently about your niche and proved it by writing insightfully on the topic for a sustained period of time?

    It's easier for a potential employer to measure your net worth to the organization from these accomplishments than from which institution you have a piece of paper from and a 60 minute interview. Some just don't realize it yet.

    You add value – you've proved it over and over. Organizations that are worth working for will recognize that more and more, and people like you, will win.

  • http://brianfrank.ca Brian Frank

    Thanks for the encouraging comments Jodi & Jeff.

    It's great to get a sense there are a lot more people along on this adventure.

  • http://www.phronk.com phronk

    Congrats on getting some of the recognition you deserve.

    I don't know how it can be accomplished, but I think the education system needs to catch up with the rapidly changing world. With easy access to almost limitless information, education is becoming more and more about how to learn rather than what to learn. Grad school reflects this more than many rote-learning undergrad programs, so it's a shame you can't skip to that level given you've already got the skills to handle it.

    And yeah, I'm right there with you in the “still figuring out what to do as a Renaissance person” stage. We just need to figure out how to monetize indecision. :)

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  • http://brianfrank.ca Brian Frank

    Maybe what we need is to return to a system of monarchy and patronage so we just sort of loaf around country estates painting landscapes, designing flying machines, ruminating on the cosmos… until we can buy our independence when we figure out how to turn lead into gold.

  • http://brianfrank.ca Brian Frank

    Maybe what we need is to return to a system of monarchy and patronage so we just sort of loaf around country estates painting landscapes, designing flying machines, ruminating on the cosmos… until we can buy our independence when we figure out how to turn lead into gold.

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